Mister Rogers and friends in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Credit: Getty Images

Ten years ago today, Fred McFeely Rogers died at age 74. Known to generations of viewers as the cardigan-clad host of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Rogers brought an element of grace to a television landscape that he saw as loud and uncaring. For more than three decades, he spoke to children without speaking down to them, teaching life lessons through songs, puppet plays, and direct addresses to the camera that made each child feel as if he were talking to them.

Rogers was sometimes lampooned by adults—Eddie Murphy‘s “Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood” sketches on Saturday Night Live are a notable example—and his program’s slow pace certainly made it an outlier in a children’s programming schedule that increasingly emphasized commercialism over content. But when Rogers chose to speak to adults, the results were dramatic. In 1969, funding to the Public Broadcasting Service, then in its infancy, was in jeopardy, and Rogers testified before the U.S. Senate. The hearings were chaired by the pugnacious Sen. John Pastore of Rhode Island, and the effect that Rogers had on Pastore’s demeanor is remarkable:

He exerted a similarly spellbinding influence on a room full of the entertainment industry’s elite when he accepted a lifetime achievement Emmy in 1997: